Cash Flawed: Common mistakes often plague savings plan

Who doesn’t worry about money? Everyone does, and in fact, even those adept at saving money will tell you that no matter how perfect their savings system is, they’ll still be a little concerned about if they’re doing everything correctly.

The truth is for most being correct when it comes to saving money is relative and specific to the person, but there are money missteps that tend to plague the masses and are relatively common for everyone in some form or fashion.

For starters, the most overlooked fault when it comes to saving money is not having a budget, and not tracking what you spend. The tracking part needs to happen before the actual budget is concocted. The problem with trying to put a budget together without actually tracking your spending means you’re trying to write something up and you have no idea what you’re actually spending, aside from the obvious such as a car payment, rent (or mortgage) and utilities. Far too often, budgets forget about the incidental spending that adds up quickly and when you set that budget and forget about those items, you wonder at the end of each month why you don’t have more money saved.

That said, you can’t make your budget all work and no play, and that simply means you have to save money aside to be spent on things you enjoy. That may sound counterproductive when you think about saving money but any leftover money needs to be there, but not at the expense of depriving yourself from one month to the next. If that means, cutting your cable bill or maybe buying used versus new when it comes to a car or truck, then so be it.

The budget has to be workable and flexible, and as much as you want to treat yourself, it can’t be at the expense of actually saving money. Far too often, when you advise someone to spend money on themselves and not withhold that feeling, they take it to mean that getting nails done or taking an impromptu vacation over the weekend means you don’t have to save money, which is totally incorrect and a rather common mistake.

Saving money is something that we all want to do and only a small amount of us actually succeed in doing. What holds us back in most cases is either not knowing how to save (although most of us do) but mostly following in the fallible footsteps of everyone else who has struggled beforehand.